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[Elite: Dangerous] New Patch! Mining and Exploring made fun!

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A lot of people do the missions in a Sidewinder, but I think that you'd be served better with something faster like a Cobra, viper, imperial eagle, or an imperial courier. Regardless, you'll need an srv

I recommend buying a hyperspace taxi, the cheapest of which is a hauler. But equip it with an srv and a discovery scanner since I don't remember if Quince sells srv's. Also buy a cheap fast ship with an srv bay. Don't skimp on the engines or shields, but otherwise have this ship be stripped down. You want good engines to be fast. You want good shields so that you don't have to be gentle when landing.

Fly the taxi to Quince and honk at every system along the way. Sell the data at Miller port to improve relations with the controlling faction. Ship your fast ship to the station and run scan missions with the taxi until the fast ship arrives in a few hours.

The Quince routine is as follows :
*Board hope until you find a board with lots of scan missions. You can accept up to two juicy missions from otherwise lackluster boards. A third scan mission will prevent other scan missions from being displayed in future board hops, so when you accept your third you need to commit and accept litterally every scan mission that's available.
*fly to the planet and land at the search site.
*scan one of the antennas with your srv's data link scanner
*return to the station to cash in. The fastest way back to the station is to get into your ship and boost into the ground, dying, and rebuying your ship from the insurance screen.

It can take a minute before the completed missions show up as something that you can turn in.

Edit : also open mode is buggy at Quince because there are too many players. I recommend making the trip to the surface in solo or private group modes. My game routinely hard locks when it attempts to enter planetary glide in open.

I'm grinding out fed rank at Bowen dock like I mentioned last night. After blindly accepting donation missions, I eventually maxed out my quest log with supply donation requests, several individual orders were in excess of 100 tons of cargo.

I'm not making that 7k ls trip in my long jumper conda, so I've shipped out my cutter, stripped away its shields to a pure cargo rack build, and now I'm gonna load her up with just shy of 800 tons of cargo to donate. I hope that makes an appreciable dent in my progress....

Joking aside, while I don't really PvP or pirate I will absolutely open fire on any unshielded ship I see in Open. It is an incredible pet peeve of mine. I don't care if people do it in Private or Solo (more power to ya), but in Open you are just begging for trouble.

There is a dearth of options for bandits these days. Cargo popping is so hard! I'd expect some sort of handy Highwayman's Friend hardware hack you could jam into your console that adds illegal features to your pilot's operating system for these matters. Elite seems like that setting for that, with the Pilot Federation's stranglehold on their universal user interface.

Joking aside, while I don't really PvP or pirate I will absolutely open fire on any unshielded ship I see in Open. It is an incredible pet peeve of mine. I don't care if people do it in Private or Solo (more power to ya), but in Open you are just begging for trouble.

My FAS never has shields. To be fair, I am begging for trouble when I'm flying it around

Joking aside, while I don't really PvP or pirate I will absolutely open fire on any unshielded ship I see in Open. It is an incredible pet peeve of mine. I don't care if people do it in Private or Solo (more power to ya), but in Open you are just begging for trouble.

My FAS never has shields. To be fair, I am begging for trouble when I'm flying it around

To be fair, even with a shield gen the FAS doesn't really have shields.

And I suppose I should have stipulated trading/cargo ships.

Imperial Cutters stripped for cargo with no shields in Open are a thing that will put me in to berserker mode and I cannot be held responsible for whatever happens next. Seriously, the rebuy cost is more than likely going to be worth more than your cargo and Solo mode is, like, right there.

I'll start worrying about defending a cargo ship the moment that they put serious incentives to have people play in open mode instead private or solo.

This might sound alittle radical but I think CGs should only be in Open. It's a community goal, be part of the community of players to interact with it, that's the purpose of it. However I think that might just push players away from the game, which is even worse than having them just play in Solo. Perhaps making the CG rewards double in Open? Higher mission payouts? Something like that would be cool IMO. Higher risk vs reward.

Speaking of things people don't like: man this game's community on the whole is hyper negative. Though I have been having fun lately in ED, I share some of their feelings. I really hope 2.4 makes a big splash with some truly new interesting gameplay or I think alot of people are going to drop off of the game. In some ways I'm way more exited for stuff beyond 2.4 because I want missions that feel like actual missions (patrol nav points , defend a station, destroy a cap ship etc) and other improvements to the base gameplay.

Though on the topic of destroy able stations and stuff in ED, I do wonder if perhaps some of the reason we don't see that currently is that it would require massive amounts of data tracking on the backend to store the current state of ALL stations in the game. However they can turn services on and off for the UA / Meta-alloy stuff so it must be technically possible. The worry that people would go around destroying ALL the stations is a non issue. The bubble is too huge for that to even be an issue, plus it should be stupid hard to pull off anyways. That's the kind of thing to draw a cap-ship response in higher sec systems I'd think. Could create all kinds of cool gameplay! That's my hope for 2.4 Thargoid events. Ambitious I know...and not really in line with FD's previous efforts. However I think it's the only thing to make any kind of sense. Why else would they have added in all those new kinds of stations, mega ships etc?

I've said some of this stuff before. Just excited / anxious for 2.4. I really hope this turns out good!

Now that you mention it @DarkMecha I am of the mind that 2.4 and the Thargoid War can really make or break the game for a lot of players, myself included. Not that I'm expecting it to be, I dunno, this game changing thing that turns everything on its head. However I do hope that it is more involved then just CZs with Thargoid ships.

Yeah a lot of ED players are negative, but fresh content has been sparse and sporadic over the years and the players have been surprisingly patient about it.

During previous updates the players' attitudes have ranged basically from "neat" to "eh, whatever". 2.4 though? With 2.4 being hyped by FDEV as a "Big Thing" a lot of people are on the edge of their seat. The excitement for 2.4 is almost palpable and I feel like this is the thing that will truly test the player base's patience.

But yeah, I hope 2.4 turns out good cause I do enjoy the game and want it to thrive.

Now that you mention it @DarkMecha I am of the mind that 2.4 and the Thargoid War can really make or break the game for a lot of players, myself included. Not that I'm expecting it to be, I dunno, this game changing thing that turns everything on its head. However I do hope that it is more involved then just CZs with Thargoid ships.

Yeah a lot of ED players are negative, but fresh content has been sparse and sporadic over the years and the players have been surprisingly patient about it.

During previous updates the players' attitudes have ranged basically from "neat" to "eh, whatever". 2.4 though? With 2.4 being hyped by FDEV as a "Big Thing" a lot of people are on the edge of their seat. The excitement for 2.4 is almost palpable and I feel like this is the thing that will truly test the player base's patience.

But yeah, I hope 2.4 turns out good cause I do enjoy the game and want it to thrive.

I have to agree with you. If 2.4 turns out to be just a bunch of CGs with Thargoid ships and a new engineer grind for anti-thargoid weapons I will put the game aside until some truly new gameplay additions are added. I think a lot of the player base feels the same and their patience is nearly at an end.

I'm not on the edge of my seat. I'm expecting the thargoid content to be a needle in a haystack somewhere in the great plains and that I'll need to jump through a dozen exponentially higher hoops to witness.

If I'm wrong then that will be wonderful. Truly superb. However that's what I've come to expect from fdev. I truly hope that I'm wrong.

I'm not on the edge of my seat. I'm expecting the thargoid content to be a needle in a haystack somewhere in the great plains and that I'll need to jump through a dozen exponentially higher hoops to witness.

If I'm wrong then that will be wonderful. Truly superb. However that's what I've come to expect from fdev. I truly hope that I'm wrong.

Having just done my first big exploration romp, I suppose I wouldn't mind a little bit more excitement and things to look for out there, but only if it's like a 5% chance of discovery or greater. I mostly enjoyed the trip(~8k lys to North American/Sadr nebulas and back), and I know that's small in the scheme of things, but it's hard to get excited at really low discovery rates.

Also, boy I was disappointed with my 10 million payout for that trip, compared to the dramatically greater return per hour of community goals or the road to riches. The visuals weren't even amazing, other than a couple of spots near to the North American Nebula, and jumping right up into Sadr's butt.

So the Anaconda is... interesting. I'm currently tooling around a low intensity resource site in order to get a feel for the thing and to give my fighter pilot a bit of training. There's just a lot of weaponry for use with the X-Box controller. I've got things setup so the huge beam in primary and everything else (they're all turrets) as secondary. Inefficient as hell, but it'll do for the moment. I'll second whoever wanted large gun turrets, the two large hard points on the dorsal hull look pretty cool with medium turrets in them, and larger is always better.

I'd expect large cannon turrets to miss a lot of the time, and for a conda to struggle to keep enemies within the optimal range for frags.

I'd probably go with the cannons if you just want a space battleship aesthetic. I will continuously lament the lack of large multi-cannon turrets, which prevents that Battlestar Galactica flak battery feel.

You may be better served by some efficient laser turrets to keep pressure on enemy shields and to bring a manually fired big gun to bear with your huge hardpoint to attack their hull.

Conda has some great convergence for fixed cannons. I'd recommend something gimbal/turret for shields and small ships though, unless you have a high level SLF NPC pilot - then they can pretty much take them out solo.

Power Play has kind of soured on me (tired of fighting 5C and private group heros), and some of the guys I played with have quit. Anyone have any PA or semi-PA minor factions or anything going? I like PvP but it's not the only part of the game I enjoy. I just like having something to advance, and after nearly 2 years of power play, I don't think I can justify time spent on it anymore.

What do most people do in ED these days? I used to play frequently when conflict zones were new, but everything from Power Play onward is new to me. Sounds like conflict zones are still popular? Anything deeper added to the gameplay? Ship rebalances?

Ok, for anyone else who is trying to grind federation rank, I've been tipped off to a faster way. You're going to need a good passenger ship. I recommend the Anaconda.

It's sightseeing missions from Ceos. In my experience so far, sightseeing missions are far more generously generated by the RNG than the data courier missions or charity missions. Since the "Sirius Atmospherics" visitor beacon at Sothis is the only visitor beacon for hundreds of lightyears around, 100% of sightseeing missions will be destined for it. Sometimes you can fill up all of your cabins without board hopping.

My anaconda is with a class 7 fuel scoop, a class 4 shield generator, a class 4 cargo bay, and a discovery scanner in its class 2 slot. All other module slots are filled with first class passenger cabins for a total of seven first class cabins. I have an eighth cabin being shipped in from Jameson Memorial. Be very careful that you STORE your fuel scoop instead of selling it, because Ceos only sells class 1 fuel scoops and it's a long way back to the bubble.

At my current rank of Lieutenant, each trip generates slightly less than 1% progress per cabin (ex: My seven cabins sent me from 72% to 78%), and each contract nets you between approximately 500k to 1.3 mil.

While you're they're go ahead and double-dip on data courier missions as well every time you flip the board. Make a trip either to the Sothis Station or the Tourist beacon depending on whether your passenger cabins or mission log is full.

Work ruined my plans to return home to the Bubble tonight. I'm 3k out and it's the most annoying thing. Everything obvious is tagged (water worlds and earthlikes), so I'm pretty much just honking and jumping. Luckily people don't seem to know about terraformables yet, and I've found several untagged ammonia worlds.

Bigity- I still consider supporting minor factions via the BGS to be Elite's endgame content.

It was weird, to put it lightly. A Federal assault ship or gunship, I think, running on stealth, AI piloted, dragged me out of supercruise, then basically torn me apart before I could quit out (which, when jumped but harassing AI while minding my own business, I consider a completely legitimate tactic in the circumstance--nevermind that the AI's ship was probably 10 times the cost of mine when outfitted). I was in a galactic power capital system, and the arriving emergency response ships apparently were too busy wedging their thumbs very high up their asses to actually do anything about it.

It was an odd, and frankly unpleasant, feeling. Not "rage-enducing", just pure and simply annoyance. The 8.2 million insurance fee is 1 to 3 RNG passenger missions. Equally annoying was the rather retarded (I find that to be accurate) condition that the game decided to respawn me in the port I started in, and not the system I was destroyed which was, coincidentally, my home system. Thanks, way to tack on the extra tedium of making me do the same trip again. That'll learn me my lesson *eye roll*.

That lesson being: next time, if there's any doubt as to what's going on, just hit the power button on your PC. I guess the whole thing was to try and remind me that, yes, even the capital of galactic powers can be dangerous, but the only thing I can think of is how weird and inappropriate the whole thing feels.

Out of interest, what were you flying Synthesis? It is usually (but not always) possible to survive long enough to high-wake out when facing NPCs, as long as you play your cards right.

A Python. I suppose the mistake was turning to fight him (then again, I guess it was a mistake thinking I could escape interdiction in the first place--interdiction felt like it lasted a few seconds, if that, barely enough time for me to get back into my chair.

I've already made the money back (it just became another chore on top of collecting Power Play credits, fun....). And obvious it was an AI ship, it's not as though there's something to hunt down--that ship no longer exists anyway. The whole takeaway from this seems to be, "If you're going to be inconvenienced, you should do the first thing your gut tells your: quit out because fuck the AI, you paid actual money for this game."

It's not a bad idea to just submit to an interdiction too. Submitting allows your FSD to recharge super fast. Typically by the time your opponent has control again your FSD is ready to go.

I'm not sure it would've worked this time--I was already taking fire on my shields by the time the "DU-WHOOOOM" sound affect of dropping actually completed. Of course it's possibly my shields would've held out until I had a chance to jump again, so maybe that was the right idea, but I was already taking fire and whatever the hell he hit me with went through my shields a lot faster than the Anaconda's I'm used to bumping into. Weird.

For awhile the game was giving npcs completely random engineered equipment. Random to the point where it could far surpass what players could create, so occasionally npcs would be generated who could just instagib you. But I thought that bug was long squashed.

I just got back from Colonia. I made approximately 80 million from the run, about 240 million for whole round trip (Bubble-Sag A-Colonia-Bubble). I should hit Elite on the turn in. The only problem is that the player faction I support is currently at war, so turning in the data now would be wasting it for BGS purposes. Ho hum.

It's nice to be back. First thing I did was jump in a CZ with my Gunship. Yisssss. And then a Haz Res in the Corvette. MMmhhhmm. Flying an explorer without guns must have gotten to me. Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Currently rocking 2 Huge Beam Lasers, 2 Pulses and 3 railguns on the Corvette. Burst DPS- We has it.